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THE EVENT
MEGALOPOLIS ★☆☆☆☆
By Francis Ford Coppola
The essentials
Miraculously, Francis Ford Coppola's new film flirts with all the limits. Complecrazy, for better and especially for worse.
Here it is at last, the Arlesienne of Francis Ford Ford Coppola, this film fantasized nearly 40 years ago and whose backbone consists of modeling the fall of the American empire on that of the Roman Empire: in New Rome, a sort of futuristic New York, Caesar Catilina, a genius architect capable of stopping time, clashes with the arch-conservative mayor Franklyn Cicero. In turn a peplum, a comedy, a political or futuristic film… Megalopolis overflows on all sides, vomiting digital special effects from another age. Coppola has made it his mission to push the limits of form in cinema, but his visual and narrative experiments never manage to mask a message of confounding naivety, opposing the imagination of artists to the lukewarmness of men incapable of dreaming big enough to save humanity. A Manichean discourse repeated ad nauseam, which leads the film towards its own downfall.
Francois Léger
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FIRST LIKED MUCH
LIVE, DIE, BE REBORN ★★★★☆
By Gaël Morel
Gaël Morel understood it well: it doesn't matter that themes have already been addressed in cinema as long as the perspective can be renewed and generate a powerful work. In this case, the story of a love triangle – a couple with a child and a photographer – struck by the devastating outbreak of AIDS in the 90s. The filmmaker films these emotions as if we were experiencing them for the first time and succeeds in a melodrama that is all the more moving because it is entirely focused on hope and consolation and is based on a sparkling trio: the stunning Lou Lampros and the radiant Théo Christine and Victor Belmondo who literally steal the show and offer these passionate beings a burning incarnation that transforms them into unforgettable life companions.
Damien Leblanc
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FIRST LIKED
EMMANUELLE ★★★☆☆
By Audrey Diwan
After his Golden Lion for The EventAudrey Diwan tackles Emmanuelle, a character who went down in history in the heart of the 70s when Just Jaeckin took her on with the theatrical triumph we know. Different times, different customs… We had therefore not necessarily anticipated her return in the heart of the 2020s, in a post #metoo era. Audrey Diwan's first challenge lies in the pact she intends to make from the outset with her viewers: forget everything you know about Emmanuelle. The second lies in her chosen angle to tell this story: the journey of a woman in search of sexual pleasure that eludes her. Hand in hand with her interpreter Noémie Merlant – once again impressive – Audrey Diwan goes to the end of her biases, avoids any concession and always remains as close as possible to this woman reappropriating her body. And there is a certain panache in this divisive gesture.
Thierry Cheze
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MOTHER LAND ★★★☆☆
By Alexandre Aja
Mother Land is therefore first of all a good concept film, the kind you make to get noticed, or, better, to give yourself a style. We are in a shack lost in a forest southern gothic where horrible satanic spirits roam. To protect her two children, a woman (Halle Berry, always at her best) can only leave the house in “sacred wood” once she is tied to it with a strong rope… It's a survival film, which looks a lot like a B version of Village : like Shyamalan's great film, Mother Land feeds from the same source (The Fourth Dimension…), but rather seeks the pleasure of the B series… until the moment when it cracks, and takes unexpected and delightful detours, to the sound of a great score by Rob.
Sylvestre Picard
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THE BEATING HEART ★★★☆☆
By Vincent Delerm
In 2019, Vincent Delerm went behind the camera for the first time with I don't know if it's everyone.a documentary that extended his work on memory at the heart of his career as a singer since always. With an art of magnifying the little nothings that constitute the essence of our lives by a mischievous poetry that we find in this Heart beating where he went to meet women and men of all generations, anonymous as well as celebrities, to make them talk about the feeling of love. And how a fleeting encounter can turn a life upside down, either because it is at the start of a relationship, or because it will remain as a regret that will never fade. Sixty-eight minutes of pure delicacy where we have the impression of finding ourselves in each of his testimonies around which Delerm creates in image and music the most beautiful of settings, as the inexhaustible transmitter of the intimate that he is.
Thierry Cheze
RIVERBOOM ★★★☆☆
By Claude Baechtold
In 2002, a year after the September 11 attacks, the young Swiss photographer Claude Baechtold accompanied two reporters on a whim to the heart of Afghanistan, which was then plunged into the middle of war. An adventure that seems perfectly irresponsible, as the boy initially feels both anxious and useless in this turbulent territory… Having found the video footage of this journey a few years ago that he thought had been lost, Baechtold created a dynamic and burlesque montage in which the journalistic expedition of three European idiots is revealed to be full of self-mockery. And if this documentary ran the risk of offering a navel-gazing point of view on the tragedies experienced by the Afghan people, the filmmaker's voice-over breathes a poignant melancholy into these events dating back twenty years. As a way of restoring a hint of innocence to a world that has continued to sink ever since.
Damien Leblanc
BEAUTIFUL CREATURES ★★★☆☆
By Guomundur Arnar Guomundsson
As violence dangerously increases among young Icelanders, Balli, 14, is a scapegoat: every day, he suffers the brutal relentlessness of his classmates. Then Addie, Konni and Siggi arrive, three brats who see him as a wounded animal and take pity on him… to the point of creating a real bond. All the charm of the film lies there, in this representation of male friendship, a mixture of humiliation and affection. Because by navigating a world that pushes them to cruelty from a young age (with a father who is either absent or abusive), the four boys allow themselves moments of striking tenderness: they hug, communicate, cry. And just when the film seems to reach its climax, the story takes a turn when the role of protagonist changes hands, introducing supernatural elements along the way, all with disconcerting fluidity.
Lucie Chiquer
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FIRST TO AVERAGE LIKED
VIETNAM AND NAM ★★☆☆☆
By Truong Minh Quy
Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his dream films placing the sensory at the heart of a process of bewitchment, have made disciples. This Vietnam and Nam recalls the shock received at the discovery of the very sensual Blissfully Yours (2002) whose credits (at least the title) came as here halfway through, a way of decentering our relationship to space and time. Here we follow two young miners madly in love, each haunted by an absent father who died as a soldier during the civil war. The spirit of the deceased is unfathomable when the bodies are missing. A quest is therefore possible. If the caressing staging created ruptures (nice work on the sound), the film locks itself in its own torpor. Otherwise we saw a magnificent final sequence and heard one of the most beautiful lines in a long time: ” Leave the light on, I'll dream better! ” Just for that.
Thomas Baurez
AFTER ★★☆☆☆
By Anthony Lapia
A techno party, a crowd of thirty-somethings high on cocaine and a young woman with provocative eyes who brings a near-stranger home to cheat her loneliness… Through this study – which would like to be naturalistic? – of a party and its protagonists, a first feature film with the appearance of a bad music video, in which the bass only stops to make way for embarrassing dialogues, despite the always excellent Louise Chevillotte. Only one question: what for?
Emma Poesy
FIRST DIDN'T LIKE
THE LUCKY ONE ★☆☆☆☆
By Franck Bellocq
A convincing cast, a punchy pitch (a young man who hires an Uber driver and passes her off as his future wife in order to extort money from his rich parents) and a plethora of misunderstandings capable of creating absurd situations… On paper, The Lucky One had all the makings of an effective comedy of the new school year. However, between the expected gags and a plot that doesn't go beyond classist caricature, nothing takes hold and the comedy disintegrates into something obvious and impersonal.
Bastien Assie
WEEKEND IN TAIPEI ★☆☆☆☆
By Georges Huang
Asia represents an essential market for the West, and Luc Besson is making eyes at it by producing and writing an action film like a thousand others, whose only singularity would reside in the place of the action: Taipei. As its romantic-silly title suggests, Taiwan is never more than a backdrop, a barely filmed postcard to serve as a setting for a vulgar story of global trafficking. The bad guys are always the foreigners, beaten with great blows of knuckle-dusters and super-fast car races, taking the protagonists between the city and the countryside, tradition and modernity… We will save Luke Evans, who plays a DEA agent with a good face, introduced in the film by an action scene in a rather successful restaurant kitchen. But this tiny breakthrough is more the exception than the rule in Weekend in Taipei…
Nicolas Moreno
And also
My sacred youth, by Carly Blackman
Distant Neighborhoods 8: Resistances, short film program
Reprises
Good, by Lino Brocka
Stories of America: Food, Family and Philosophy, by Chantal Akerman